


I Have Drunk Too Deeply of Grief

by awritingrose



Series: I Wish I Was The Moon-verse [2]
Category: Video Blogging RPF, Who Killed Markiplier, markiplier - Fandom
Genre: Death, Suicidal Ideation, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-05
Updated: 2018-11-05
Packaged: 2019-08-18 20:56:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16524488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/awritingrose/pseuds/awritingrose
Summary: The Barnum Manor is no place to mourn. There are things in the shadows waiting for an opening.





	I Have Drunk Too Deeply of Grief

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: SUICIDE. This fic is explicit about suicide and suicidal ideation. It is written by someone who has been suicidal and uses that experience as a basis for the descriptions in this fic. Please tread with caution.  
> Notes: basically I lost my tagging privileges on tumblr and my writing no longer shows up in the tag so y'all are stuck with me now. As per usual, no one is a reliable narrator, and take their views of other characters with a grain of salt--especially if they make that other character seem too good to be true.

Mark buys his way out of the draft. Or his uncle does, at any rate. William is already gone and they cannot lose both of their sons. It is easy to do when you’re rich and powerful, easy to send another man to die in your place. It is easy not to think of what you’ve done.

Damien does it, too, but he has a sister he can blame for his ineligibility; she is unmarried and unemployed and he must care for her, he says. In truth, Celine is more capable of caring for herself than either Damien or Mark is, but there are things the government never needs to know.

Mark is glad for it. He is glad he is home when his aunt and uncle get sick, because he is the one to take them to the hospital, to round up the others. He doesn’t know what else to do. William is a world away, and it is clear his parents will not survive. So Mark tries his best to be their son.

He sits by their beds as they die, with Tess at his side even though he’d begged Damien to take her out of the room. She holds his hand and they are not allowed to touch his aunt and uncle as they take terrible, jagged breaths, and it is all Mark can do to keep from screaming at the nurses to please, God, give them more morphine, see how they’re suffering?

He is glad for Tess, in the aftermath, and her insistence upon writing William with the news. He knows she blames herself. Her mother was sick first, and none of them were there. They hadn’t even known her mother had passed until Damien had gone to check on her one day and found Tess staring at the corpse. She thinks she brought the sickness to the Barnums, somehow. She thinks she could have saved them.

He is glad she lies. _They didn’t suffer_ , she writes; _it was quick_. Mark knows he would’ve told William the truth. He knows William deserves the truth. But Tess tells honeyed lies that are so much easier to swallow.

He is home when Celine carries Tess into the manor, Tess shivering and pale and covered in sweat. She looks like his aunt did when they thought this was some ordinary illness.

They put Tess in her room, and then Mark refuses to leave it. The farthest he goes is the attached bathroom. He barely sleeps for three days. Maybe he doesn’t sleep at all.

He knows what it looks like when Tess starts to die. He locks the door to give himself time. He cannot face Damien and Celine coming in to see her and finding her dead, not before he’s had time to clean her up, not until he’s sure she isn’t going to recover.

She lets out a terrible, jagged breath, and she does not take another one. She goes still. He cries, as quietly as he can, in his chair. He watches her chest. She’ll breathe. She’ll breathe. Tess cannot be gone. Tess is eternal, Tess is so full of life, Tess is not even twenty yet, she is the youngest of the group and this cannot happen to her.

He watches her body all night, waiting. And then, just as the sun crests over the hills, she moves.

It is gradual little twitches, a wrinkling of her nose, like she’s having some terrible dream. Then, finally, her chest rises and falls again—and then again, and she is breathing, nevermind the dried blood on her lips and the last eight hours where she was dead.

She couldn’t have been dead. It must have been a nightmare of his own. He is delusional. He hasn’t slept.

Mark gathers her up in his arms and clutches her to his chest, sobbing into her hair when she wakes.

_I cannot lose you_ , he thinks.

“You won’t,” she says, her voice raspy.

He must’ve said it aloud without meaning to. There is no other explanation.

And then William comes back a broken man, nothing left of the brother Mark grew up with. Tess tells herself the beautiful lie that everything is as it’s always been, and Mark finds he cannot bring himself to tell her the truth. He remembers too vividly the pallor of her skin.

But Mark _sees_. He sees things he didn’t use to. He marries Celine quickly, too quickly, because he sees the way William looks at her and Mark has to have _something_ of his own.

Tess is not his. Tess is William’s, she has always been William’s. The Barnums were William’s. His childhood was William’s. Everything has always been about William.

The manor is his. _Celine_ is his. He can be happy with that.

Except William—goddamn William, damn him to hell, Mark will see him burn—cannot be happy with it. He cannot leave Mark alone. Tess is gone, and Mark bears that cross, knows that if he had been more vigilant he would’ve seen that Julian was no good, and he would still have Tess where he wants her.

He cannot remember why he used to be glad that Tess could leave. He cannot remember why he ever wanted her to leave.

William has always wanted everything Mark has. And now that neither of them have Tess, now that Mark has the manor, William has to _take_. And he takes Celine. Seduces her, when Mark isn’t home, turns her _against_ him and _steals_ her because William has never known when to stop. He has never known how to be happy with what he has. And Celine—

No, this is not Celine’s fault. William did this. Celine would never have turned on him.

Celine would never have left him so alone. So vulnerable.

And when Mark is alone and thinking of everything he has lost, he thinks of Tess’s ragged last breaths. He thinks of how peaceful she looked once she had settled. How her skin had not been gray but porcelain in the moonlight, and she’d been beautiful in death, she’d been the Lady of Shalott on a blood-stained pillowcase.

He writes a note. It is poetic and beautiful. He stages the scene. Benjamin will be the one to find him, he is sure, and that is unfortunate. But it cannot be helped.

It takes a surprising amount of tries before he either hits something vital or bleeds out.

Yet in the morning, the first ray of sunrise wakes him, sore and bloody. And that is when Mark knows what he has at his disposal. That is when he knows he can finally—finally—get the vengeance he has been so long denied.

Oh, Tess shows up on his doorstep, and he didn’t expect that. She has no place in his revenge. She is meant to be gone, on the other side of the country, not here and pretending she _cares_. Pretending they do not both know she will always choose William over him. It pains him to hurt her, because he knows she does not deserve his rage, but it is better to hurt her now and save her than to let her become a casualty. She is still his sister. He still loves her more than he wants blind justice.

For a while, anyway.

Then, when he is writing the invitations to a poker party, he addresses one to Tess without even thinking. She should not be there. She has suffered enough. She has always sat by his side and suffered with him.

But…has she?

He’s seen the way she cavorts about with Damien. Abe has taken plenty of pictures. He knows exactly what secrets Damien is keeping from her, because _he_ is the one helping to hide them. She told Mark she loved him, that she was his sister, but really, where has she been? Receiving gifts from William? Making puppy-dog eyes at Damien, at _Celine’s_ twin?

Where was her anger? Where was her reproach of William? Where was she when the noose was too short and Mark strangled to death instead of snapping his neck as he’d wanted?

He seals the envelope. He does not need to harm her. But she will bear witness.

He takes Damien’s body. Damien, powerful, happy, free. Damien, with Tess’s love. Damien, with the world’s love. Yes, that will be enough.

He will wait til William is dead. He will wait til Tess and Abe have left to retrieve the police, and then he will leave Celine’s room, he will tell Tess that all is well (he will do so as Damien, because she has taught him all about kind lies), and then he will have everything he’s ever wanted because the world will worship him.

He hears a gunshot on the other side of the door. He hears Tess scream. He hears Tess scream _Abe’s_ name. No. That isn’t right.

He hears a second shot.

For a moment, there is that same poisonous rage, that William truly could not be happy until he had salted the earth, that William has even taken Tess from him, Tess who has never done a thing wrong, but William could not allow Mark to have even her—

And then there is a dull thump from the first floor, and his mind is clear for the first time in years, and Mark realizes what he’s done.

**Author's Note:**

> as always follow me @rose-writes-things on tumblr if you want to see more!


End file.
